Populations formerly were distributed in rural areas. Retail business was conducted at small stores where sales personnel knew customers personally and helped them accordingly. Many people migrated to urban areas where retail business has become large and centralized. Customers and sales personnel interact more anonymously, even in a face-to-face setting, proceeding from initial contact through final sale.
Online Internet business, which also has an anonymous character, has become a popular sales channel.
Large retail business use a combination of the channels, e.g., in-person and online, to service customers.
Customers that are accustomed to online shopping may have less inclination, when placed in a face-to-face setting, to interact with sales personnel. This may be especially true where online technology has been made available on portable communication devices so that a customer can examine merchandise in a vendor's brick-and-mortar establishment and simultaneously conduct an online comparison of prices of similar merchandise offered by a different vendor.
Merchant's offer WIFI connection to customers in brick-and-mortar facilities. The customers often use the WIFI for the comparative shopping. The merchants often use the WIFI to garner information about the customers or about the customers' portable communication devices. Using the information, the merchant may track the location of a customer within the merchant's facility. The customers may view the garnering as an invasion of privacy, but may be unable or unwilling to forego access to WIFI to prevent the invasion of privacy.
Customers have personal goals and needs and typically have accumulated vast numbers of personal. Businesses have used the data to market digitally, but strategies for using the data as a means to better meet those goals and needs during an on-site visit to the merchant's facility have not developed. Furthermore, the data may not be placed in a context that puts sales personnel in a position to address the goals and needs.
It would therefore be desirable to provide apparatus and methods for limiting or reducing privacy invasion while shopping by personalizing customer-sales personnel interactions.